Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Ye's, exactly. Legal HD video streaming (which is about 300kbytes/sec, or a little over 1GB/hour) dwarfs ebook piracy in terms of traffic.
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Ebooks obviously won't even appear in most statistics about data traffic.
But allow me to build a brief chain of logic:
- Most ISPs cap at 100GB per day.
- This can be reached by a huge family, each member streaming Netflix for (many) hours.
- But I dare say, it will be rare exceptions, reaching 100GB every single day by streaming Netflix. Majority probably only reaches this daily limit by downloading huge quantities of BlueRay- or DVD-Rips.
- Purchasing a movie is between € 7 and € 15.
- That's about the same price range as an eBook. (Yes, they can be cheaper, but so do movies. And yes, you can have books for free, but my point was about pirated stuff vs. bought one not free one).
- If it's interesting enough to pirate movies, why should it be any different for eBooks? Maybe eBook readers are more loyal to their hobby or a different breed altogether or the number of readers is smaller than the number of movie viewers. But piracy to a large extent is about money (saving and generating), so the comparison of figures with movies certainly makes some sense.
- So, if you would agree with me, that this enormous amount of data is a strong indicator for massive movie downloads (another indicator would be 3 law offices in Munich alone, solely focusing on "declarations to cease and desist" and the respective financial penalties): Do you expect it to be drastically different for eBooks?
One could even reason, there's more to gain with eBooks than with movies.
It's about the same amount of money for a fraction of the data volume.
If someone wants to sell BlueRay-Rips, he needs some infrastructure in place to handle the traffic. For eBooks of 1MB and less it would be way easier - for the same value of pirating (€ 7 to € 15 per book/movie or something like that).